News

Costco receives initial green light for long-awaited Issaquah headquarters expansion

November 6, 2018

The expansion plan includes two buildings at the headquarters (999 Lake Drive). One is a nine-story, 620,000-square-foot office building with one level of below-grade parking. The second is a 10-story, 685,000-square-foot parking structure with 35,000 square feet of ground-level space to be used for an employee fitness facility, a vendor exhibit area and for product display and review.

For more than 15 years, Costco Wholesale’s 30-acre corporate campus in Issaquah has been unable to add much office space, forcing the company to take up space wherever it could buy or lease it in the surrounding area.

Now the company has received the land use approval necessary from the City of Issaquah to move forward with a long-awaited 1.2-million-square-foot expansion. The company and its architectural firm MG2 now will have to apply for and receive a building permit.

The cost of the expansion has not yet be released, and Costco did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The expansion plan includes two buildings at the headquarters (999 Lake Drive). One is a nine-story, 620,000-square-foot office building with one level of below-grade parking. The second is a 10-story, 685,000-square-foot parking structure with 35,000 square feet of ground-level space to be used for an employee fitness facility, a vendor exhibit area and for product display and review.

A rendering of Costco Wholesale's proposed expansion at its Issaquah headquarters campus. The new parking structure and office building would be connected with a skybridge.

 

The office building will have room for 4,000 employees. This willallow approximately 2,000 corporate employees to be consolidated from surrounding properties onto Costco’s Pickering Place headquarters campus while also allowing for future growth, MG2 said.

Costco’s campus currently has about 529,000 square feet of office space and construction is expected to begin on the expansion in the third quarter of 2019, according to MG2.

Costco’s campus sits within the city’s newly-defined urban core and is adjacent to Issaquah Creek and the Pickering Trail at the campus’ eastern edge. A critical aspect of the design process with the city has been preserving pedestrian connectivity, MG2 said.

The two companies have been working on this expansion plan sine 2013. Their first step was the signing of a 30-year development agreement with the city in 2014 that supports the campus expansion while also providing new opportunities for city’s infrastructure improvements in the area by Costco paying its traffic mitigation fees up front.

*Published in the Puget Sound Business Journal; written by Coral Garnick.